The Umbral Choir/Gameplay
}} Gameplay There are several unique qualities that give the Umbral Choir one of the most unique playstyles in ES2. The Umbral choir has a very unique settlement/colonization mechanic, has several different hacking options not available to other factions, and has cloaking globally available to all of it's ships - and systems - from the beginning of the game. Colonization Unlike most factions; the UC has a single primary system (the only one on which it erects buildings). This system is located in a special node (i.e. a black hole, nebular cloud, asteroid field, etc), and is filled with 5 artificial planets of a new type called "Crescents". Using a special hacking mechanic, they're also able to seed other planets with a special colony-like entity called a "Sanctuary". Sanctuaries are hidden to other players, do not obstruct other players from colonizing on top of them and can co-exist after that happens, are unable to build buildings (though they can benefit from buildings in the home system), and feed resources back to the home system. Furthermore, they can implant "Transmigration Beacons" into special nodes, both acquiring the special provided by that node, but also - in an utmost emergency, allowing their home system to actually teleport itself to that node to escape destruction (note that this has a long cooldown-system to prevent abuse). Sanctuaries The Umbral Choir has a single system that operates in the ordinary manner you'd expect most ES2 factions to operate. It's a special, 5-planet system filled with a unique planet type called "Crescents", which are always cold/sterile, and have a unique roster of anomalies and terraformation targets (essentially these are ringworlds, and terraforming one adds additional rings to it, boosting the pop capacity and per-pop yields). Despite this being a relatively nice system, it's only a single system. The UC are not limited, however, to this one system. They have a special way to expand through the galaxy, creating these strange things called "Sanctuaries". It's not entirely clear what these are - the lore suggests a conglomeration of nano-machines and other cloaked infrastructure - they're able to house UC populations, but at the same time, these are immaterial creatures made of pure energy/information, so there's a lot of room for imagination and interpretation here. Creating Sanctuaries There are multiple ways to construct a Sanctuary - the primary one is by attempting to hack a node that has no enemy colonies on it (not to be confused with outposts). If you hack a neutral node, once the hack reaches the planet, you're immediately able to create a Sanctuary on an unoccupied planet for which you have the colonization tech. If you hack an enemy system, you are still allowed to create Sanctuaries, even on their occupied planets, but you must first implant two sleepers on that planet. You are also able to create Sanctuaries by "taking over" an enemy planet; this applies both to minor factions (whether by assimilation or conquest), and to enemy factions. If you conquer an enemy planet, you're not allowed to actually seize their planet in the way other factions can. Instead, you're given the choice of razing the system and creating Sanctuaries on every formerly colonized planet, or instantly abducting any and all sleepers resident on the planets. Sanctuary Defense Sanctuaries are cloaked - yes, "cloaked" like a combat ship. They can be detected either by an enemy flying a ship by them which has cloaking detection that meets-or-exceeds their cloaking level, or by an enemy hacking that particular node. The cloaking level of a Sanctuary is dependent on how many planets in that system are Sanctuaries - rather than being associated with your global cloaking level in the military tree. This is capped at a level of 3. If an enemy detects your Sanctuary, they cannot simply remove it; in order to clear it out, they will need to actually *invade* it, in the sense of a ground troop invasion. Each Sanctuary starts with a default of 200 , and will have an additional 100 added for each sanctuaried planet inside that system. An enemy UC can directly use a hacking operation to destroy an enemy Sanctuary (it's unclear at the time of this writing if that action is available to all enemies, or just UC enemies. Sanctuary Resources Sanctuaries feed resources back to the primary UC system. The primary UC system can choose to spawn population units on Sanctuary planets (there's no means to ship them between systems, you merely can choose which one to spawn them on permanently), and each unit of population on a Sanctuary can interact with the planetary in the normal, expected way. The population hosted on a Sanctuary is shown below the planet in the system view, and although the housing capacity is directly tied to the planet type just as it is for physical populations, the Sanctuary pop does not interfere with the physical population in any way. Note that the UC, unlike all other factions, is not limited to creating a single population unit per turn. They'll create as many as they have for, and it's likely to have the core UC system have in excess of enough to create multiple populations per turn. There are a host of interactions with per-resource yield bonuses which still need to be investigated (as resulting from buildings and such). There are a few of these that explicitly affect Sanctuaries as well (such as the basic / buildings giving +10 /planet), but it's the rest of them that are unclear. Many of these are potentially game-changing, but may get patched out as 'exploits' (for example, getting the luxury resource boost that gives +2 per pop appears to work on Sanctuaries). Hacking The UC has a few unique hacking options. These include the ability to create Sanctuaries upon empty planets, the ability to not merely create sleeper-agents on enemy systems, but also to abduct them and turn them into the UC's special, secondary population type, and the ability to hack a special node (i.e., black hole, nebular cloud, asteroid field) to create a Transmigration Beacon. The UC also has innate, special bonuses to hacking, allowing it to hack more simultaneous targets than other factions, to get bonuses to hacking speed unavailable to other factions, and since their primary population provides bandwidth, to get vastly more bandwidth than almost any other faction could get. Cloaking The UC has the ability to cloak all of its ships from the very beginning of the game. This does not require a cloaking module (unlike all other factions), and it also allows them to cloak any ships it owns, not merely the faction-specific ships but any ships acquired from minor factions, mercenaries, or curiosities. Like other factions, they can boost their cloaking power via military tech research. Minor Faction Interaction Like the Vodyani, the UC are completely shut out of acquiring other population types. The developers have nipped every possible way you could acquire one; it's just forbidden by the gameplay mechanics. You are able to interact with minor faction systems, and gain with them. Two major interactions are changed: * Firstly, the "Selective Migration" interaction would normally send you a single population unit in return for luxury resources. This has been replaced with trading the same amount of luxury resources for a one-time influx of 100 , via an action called "Survival Training". This is actually rather worthwhile, since the UC have an extremely painful time acquiring (they are likely the utmost faction that struggles with this in the game, far outclassing even the Riftborn). * Secondly, "Assimilating" the faction via either completing their quest, or buying them out with , is replaced with an action called "Abduct". Upon completing either of those, you will gain the faction's Assimilation Trait, all units of the faction's population will disappear, you will gain the faction's ships (as you do as any other faction upon assimilation), and the settled planets of that minor faction's system will receive Sanctuaries on each planet previously colonized by the minor. Contrary, perhaps, to expectations, these new Sanctuaries will be empty. By the lore, it's assumed that the UC is somehow converting the population to living information, as they do with the Umbral Shadow pop units converted from former "sleepers", but ... you neither receive Umbral Shadows nor additional Umbral Choir pop units. They're just gone. Nevertheless, the conversion of minor faction systems is fairly advantageous to you, since their assimilation bonuses (usually) work on your Sanctuaries, but also since they give you new places - potentially in extremely far-flung parts of the galaxy, to seed a new node network of Sanctuaries and backdoors for hacking. Hacking Hacking was a new mechanic introduced in the DLC which introduced the Umbral Choir ("Penumbra") and is central to their mechanics. Most hacking mechanics are available to all factions. The UC has a few significant bonuses to hacking (especially when considering their unique-faction-quest rewards), and also has access to a few unique hacking actions which replace mechanics available to other factions. There a few unique things the UC can do via hacking; * They can hack empty systems to create a "Sanctuary" * With 2 sleepers present on the victim system, they can create Sanctuaries on enemy systems and planets. * They can abduct sleepers, which get turned into their "super population" on the UC home system, called "Umbral Shadows" Speed Stats Note that there are a few significant numerical values worth considering about hacking: "Hacking Speed" can be boosted by several things, but is capped at a 95% boost. The speeds over various kinds of space are as follows. Note that "1 unit of distance" is how far a ship with a movement speed of "1" could travel in a single turn: * 2.9 distance units/turn for hacking along a starlane. * If you don't have "Free Movement" (the ability from that T2 tech that allows your ships to fly through open, non-starlane space), then it's impossible to have hack routes over empty space. * If you have Free Movement, you'll get 0.75 distance units/turn across empty space. * You're capped at a maximum hack distance (over empty space) of 23 units, which is the same distance Unfallen vining is capped at. Traces Traces are the main thing you're worried about when hacking. The main thing that traces do is to cancel out your hack. If a trace reaches the hacking source before the hack finishes, then the hack gets cancelled. They can also apply some "malus" to your system (generally the same sorts of consequences that successful hacking can apply). Traces will only be created on an enemy system that has a Defensive Program installed - if the enemy system has no such program, you can freely hack it with no consequences whatsoever (note that this applies in reverse - if you don't have a defensive program on your system, it's a sitting duck). The main strategic concern about traces is that they travel at 2x the speed of the hack over empty space. They only start once your hack actually *reaches* the target planet, so what you're really looking at as a "contest" between the two is the time duration that the trace will take to cover that empty space, versus the time duration that your hack needs (once at the target) to crunch through the hacking timecost of that node. These numbers can be adjusted with defensive/offensive programs, but at heart, the biggest factor lies in taking just long enough of a "trip through space" for the hack to get that that it outweighs the time the trace will take. As a rule of thumb, usually a route that passes through two nodes will get you enough time, whereas usually a single-node-jump will leave you with too little time for the trace to complete.